TALEB - Aphorisms

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Poetic & Philosophical Aphorisms

Work in Progress

2010

TABLE

LIFE, HATE, LOVE, ETC. 2

SUCCESS, INSUCCESS, HAPPINESS, AND STOICISM 7

AGING 9

THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS 10

THE UNIVERSAL AND THE PARTICULAR 13

FOOLED BY RANDOMNESS 14

(RE)BECOMING FREE 15

AESTHETICS 18

ETHICS 19

EPISTEMOLOGY 21

THE GENERALIZED SUCKER PROBLEM 22

ROBUSTNESS AND FRAGILITY 24

THE LUDIC FALLACY AND ITS EXTENSIONS 25

THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE 26

POETIC & PHILOSOPHICAL APHORISMS

5/17/10 © Copyright 2009 by N. N. Taleb. This draft version cannot be disseminated or quoted. 2

DEALING WITH THE FUTURE 27

BEING A PHILOSOPHER AND MANAGING TO REMAIN ONE 28

POLITICS, ECONOMICS, AND OTHER VERY VULGAR SUBJECTS 29

Life, Hate, Love, etc .

1.

The opposite of success isn't failure, it is name dropping.

2.

You know you have influence when people start noticing your

absence more than the presence of others.

3.

Badmouthing is the only genuine expression of admiration.

4.

They will envy you for your success, for your wealth, for your

intelligence, for your looks, for your status --but rarely for your

wisdom



5.

Most of what they call humility is successfully disguised

arrogance.

6.

If you want people to read a book, tell them it is overrated.

7.

The mark of a mediocre mind is the subdued and passive

reaction in front of the truly exceptional.

8.

Hatred is love with a typo somewhere in the computer code,

correctable but very hard to find.

9.

I wonder whether a bitter enemy would be jealous if he

discovered that I hated someone else.

10.

You will get the most attention from those who hate you. No

friend, no admirer, and no partner will flatter you with equal

curiosity.

11.

True humility is when you can surprise yourself more than

others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing.

12.

Social media are antisocial, health foods are empirically

unhealthy, knowledge workers are ignorant, & social sciences aren't

scientific.

13.

The strangest thing about this love business is that the more

intensely enthralled two being are with each other the harder they

will try to hurt each other later on.

They seem to care about the smallest wound now in the other

but they will be inflicting the most scathing one later. Love is not for

philosophers.



14.

The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general

terms, mankind's flaws, biases, contradictions & irrationality --

without exploiting them for fun and profit.

15.

The test of whether you really liked a book is if you reread it

(and how many times); the test of whether you really liked someone's

company is if you are ready to meet him again and again --the rest is

spin, namedropping, or that variety of sentiment now called self-

esteem.

16.

We ask "why is he rich (or poor)?" not "why isn't he richer

(poorer)?";"why is the crisis so deep?" not "why isn't it deeper?".

17.

When someone starts a sentence with "simply", you should

expect to hear something very complicated.

18.

The most depressing aspect of the lives of the couples you watch

surreptitiously arguing in restaurants is that they are almost always

unaware of the true subject of argument.

19.

Nothing is more permanent than "temporary" arrangements,

deficits, truces, and relationships; and nothing is more temporary

than "permanent" ones.

20.

I attended a symposium, event named after a 4th Century (BC)

Athenian drinking party in which nonnerds talked about love; alas,

there was no drinking but, mercifully, nobody talked about love.

21.

The most painful moments are not those we spend with

uninteresting people; it is those spent with uninteresting people

trying hard to be interesting.

22.

It is as difficult to change someone's opinions as it is to change

his tastes.



23.

The opposite of enemy is a dull life.

24.

Hatred is much harder to fake than love. You hear of fake love;

never of fake hate.

25.

To value a person, consider the difference between how

impressive he (she) was at the first encounter and the most recent

one.

26.

Some reticent people use silence to conceal their intelligence;

but most do so to hide the lack of it.

27.

Usually, what we call "good listener" is someone with skillfully

polished indifference.

28.

The tragedy of virtue is that the more boring, unoriginal, and

sermonizing the proverb/tweet, the harder it is to implement.

29.

It is the appearance of inconsistency, and not its absence, that

makes people attractive.

30.

This, I suspect, was the reason they put Socrates to death. There is something terribly unattractive about thinking with too much clarity. Nobody wants to his reasoning to become perfectly transparent --not to others, not to himself.

31.

It is easier to remember your emails that were not answered

than emails you did not answer

32.

People reserve standard compliments to those who do not

threaten their pride; the others they praise by calling "arrogant"



33.

For company, you tend to prefer those who find you interesting

over those you find interesting.

34.

Unrequited hate is vastly more diminishing for the self than

unrequited love. You can't react by demonizing.

35.

I may forgive someone for harming me; I can't possibly forgive

anyone for boring me.

36.

How superb to become wise without being boring; how sad to be

boring without being wise .

[looking at Bernanke].

37.

It is as difficult to avoid bugging others with advice on how to

exercise and other health matters as it is to stick to an exercise

schedule.

38.

Half of what we call arrogant is arrogant; the other half is

conviction and beliefs.

39.

When a woman says about a man that he is intelligent, she

means handsome; when a man says about a woman that she is dumb,

he means attractive.



40.

It is only by accident that what ordinary people say they will do

corresponds to what they will actually do.

41.

Most of the unhappiness in the modern world is the injustice

that, in the past, only some of the males, but all the females, were

able to procreate. Equality was made for females, not males.

Success , Insuccess , Happiness , and Stoicism

42.

Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to

be in late childhood. The rest comes from loss of control.

43.

You are rich if, and only if, money you refuse tastes better than

money you accept.

44.

Success is when you switch from the camp of the hating to the

camp of the hated.



45.

To see if you like where you are, without the chains of

dependence, check if you are as happy returning as you were leaving.

This also applies to work, relationships, and many things.

46.

The difference between love and happiness is that those who

talk about love tend to be in love; but those who talk about happiness

tend to be not happy.

47.

I have been the luckiest man in the world in my selection of

enemies.

48.

Money earned speculating against the crowd and the common

man does not feel as sordid and vulgar as money coming from other

forms of commerce, and not as lowly as money coming from

employment. It is as if it came entirely from the purest philosophical

insights.

49.

It is much harder to be a Stoic when wealthy, powerful, and

respected than when destitute, miserable, and lonely.

50.

Ordinary men regret their words more than their silence; finer

men regret their silence more than their words.

51.

A good foe is far more loyal, far more predictable, and, to the

clever, far more useful than any admirer

52.

Modernity: We created youth without heroism, age without

wisdom, and life without grandeur.

53.

You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him who he

finds interesting.



54.

Most people are made for insuccess; they lose their charm and

become unbearable when they succeed.

55.

The two most celebrated acts of courage in history aren't

Homeric fighters, but two Eastern Mediterraneans who died, even

sought death, for their ideas.

56.

If existence were about happiness, more would accept to be

"happy imbeciles".

57.

I wonder if anyone measured the time it takes, at a party, before

a mildly successful stranger who went to Harvard makes others

aware of it.

Aging

58.

The only objective definition of aging is when a person starts to

talk about aging.

59.

Decline starts with the replacement of dreams with memories,

reverses with the replacement of dreams with other dreams, and

ends with the replacement of memories with other memories.

60.

Since Cato, a certain sign of aging has been when one starts

blaming the new generation for "shallowness" and praising the

previous one for its "values"

61.

Pomponius Atticus, severely ill, tried, the Stoic way, to take his

own life. Having chosen starvation, he was cured of his illness.



62.

I read nothing from the past 300 years; I drink nothing from the

past 4000 years (just wine and water); but I talk to no ordinary man

over 40. A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of 30.

63.

I never understood why they wrote the obituaries of bureaucrats

after their death.

64.

Some pursuits are much duller from the inside than outside;

even piracy can be terribly uninteresting. Unless you are good at

detecting dullness you will be trapped for life.

The Republic of Letters

65.

Writing is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing.

66.

Most people write so they can remember things; I write to

forget.

67.

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close

enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same

thing.

68.

What they call philosophy, I call literature; what they call

literature I call journalism; what they call journalism I call gossip,

and what they call gossip I call voyeurism.



69.

Writers are remembered for their best work, politicians for their

worst mistakes; and businessmen are almost never remembered.

70.

Charm lies in the unsaid, the unwritten, and the undisplayed. It

takes mastery to control silence.

71.

No author should be considered as having failed until he starts

teaching others about writing.

72.

Hard science gives sensational results, with a horribly boring

process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process;

real literature gives sensational results with a sensational process;

and economics gives boring results with a boring process.

73.

An aphorism is the poetry of ideas.

74.

The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the

intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination

75.

A maxim allows me to have the last word without even starting a

conversation.

76.

A good maxim should 1) surprise you, 2) be true (counter-

intuitively true), and 3) be either symmetric (one assertion, one

negation) or rhythmic.

77.

Just as there are authors who enjoy "having written" and others

who enjoy writing, there are books you enjoy reading and others you

enjoy having read.

78.

Giving business readers my book is like giving vintage Bordeaux

to drinkers of Diet Coke and listening to their comments about it.



79.

A genius is someone with flaws harder to imitate than his

qualities.

80.

With regular books, I read the text and skip the footnotes; with

those written by academics I read the footnotes and skip the text, and

with business books I skip both the text and the footnotes.

81.

"Business books": a category invented by bookstores for writings

that have no depth, no style, no empirical rigor, and no linguistic

sophistication.

82.

I wish to say some day about someone "Voilà un homme!" as

Napoleon said upon meeting Goethe: a mixture of passion, intellect,

and elegance.

83.

Just like poets and artists, bureaucrats are born, not made; it

takes normal humans extraordinary effort to keep attention on such

boring tasks.

84.

The costs of specialization: Architects build to impress other

architects; models are thin to impress other models; academics to

impress other academics; filmmakers to impress other filmmakers,

painters to impress art dealers; but authors who write to impress

book editors tend to fail.

85.

I aim to never answer critics, just plan to stay in print as long as

possible --insure that I will be on the shelves long after these critics

are dead.

86.

I can predict when someone is about to plagiarize me, and

poorly so, when they claim that Taleb "popularized" the theory of

Black Swan events.

87.

Journalism is what disappears a day after it is printed;

electronic journalism is what dies even before it is posted; literature

aims to never go out of print.



88.

You are as alive as the ratio of clichés in your writing.

89.

BusinessBookReaders with my prose are like deaf persons in a

Puccini opera: they may like a thing or two while wondering "what's

the point?"

90.

Businessmen hire people to write books for them; I discovered

that they also hire people to read books for them (with abstracts)

The Universal and the Particular

91.

Common minds find similarities in stories (and situations),

finer minds detect differences.

92.

There is nothing deemed harmful (in general) that cannot be

beneficial in some particular instances, and nothing deemed

beneficial that cannot harm you in some circumstances. Universals

are weaker under complexity.

93.

We unwittingly amplify commonalities with friends,

dissimilarities with strangers, and contrasts with enemies.



Fooled by Randomness

94.

Never rid anyone of an illusion unless you can replace it in his

mind with another illusion. But don't work too hard on it; the

replacement illusion does not even have to be more convincing than

the initial one.

95.

Corollary to Moore's laws: every ten years, collective wisdom

degrades by half.

96.

The tragedy of the information age is that the toxicity of data

increases much faster than its benefits.

97.

The fool views himself more unique, and others more generic;

the wise views himself more generic and others more unique

98.

The sucker's trap is when you focus on what you know and what

others don't know, rather than the reverse.

99.

Medieval man was a cog in a wheel he did not understand;

modern man is a cog in a more complicated system he thinks he

understands.

100.

The role of the media is best seen in the journey from Cato the

elder to Sarah Palin. Do some extrapolation if you want to be scared.

101.

Using, as excuse, others' failure of common sense is in itself a

failure of common sense.

102.

Before checking the news today, check how much the 400-700

hours of nongossip media exposure in 2007 helped you make sense

of 2008, etc.



103.

Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around.

Comment: The biggest error since Socrates has been to believe that lack of clarity is the source of all our ills, not the result of them.

104.

Finer men tolerate others' small inconsistencies though not the

large ones; lesser men tolerate others' large inconsistencies though

not small ones

(Re)Becoming Free

105.

The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates,

and a monthly salary.

106.

I wonder if a lion (or a cannibal) would pay a high premium for

free-range humans.

107.

Someone who says "I am busy" is either declaring incompetence

(and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.

108.

The difference between slaves (in Roman and Ottoman days)

and today's employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.



109.

You have a real life if & only if you do not compete with anyone

in any of your pursuits.

110.

You will be civilized on the day when you can spend a long

period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing,

without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.

111.

I never see the world with more clarity than when I misplace my

eyeglasses.

112.

You have a real life when most of what you fear has the

titillating prospect of adventure.

113.

If you know, in the morning, what your day looks like with any

precision, you are a little bit dead -the more precision, the more dead

you are.

114.

There is no intermediate state between ice and water but there

one is between life and death: employment.

115.

Only in recent history has "working hard" signaled pride rather

than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura.

116.

Their idea of the sabbatical is to work six days and rest for one;

my idea of the sabbatical is to work for (part of) a day and rest for six.

117.

What they call play (gym, travel, sports) look like work; what I

call work (effortless daydreaming) looks like play. They lose freedom

trying harder; the harder they try, the more captive they become.

118.

In nature we never repeat the same motion. In captivity (office,

gym, commute, sports), life is just repetitive stress injury. No

randomness.



119.

Technology's double punishment is to make us both age

prematurely and live longer.

120.

Most modern technologies are deferred punishment.

121.

We are better at (involuntarily) doing out of the box than

(voluntarily) thinking out of the box. Thinking is largely ornamental,

for show-off, ex post justification, or for ego-propping narratives.

122.

We are hunters; we are only truly alive in these moments when

we improvise; no schedule, just small surprises and stimuli from

environment.

123.

For everything, I use my feeling of boredom in place of a clock,

as a biological wristwatch, though under constraints of politeness.

124.

Competitive athletes are closer to animals than men; though

never as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox.



Aesthetics

125.

The genius of Mandelbrot lies in showing that we can achieve

aesthetic clarity without the cost of smoothness.

126.

Beauty is enhanced by a touch of imperfection.

127.

It is a great feat to reach simplicity without recourse to

smoothness.

128.

Almutanabbi boasted that he was the greatest poet; but he did

so using the greatest poetry.

129.

Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.

130.

In classical renderings of prominent figures, males are lean &

females are plump; in modern photographs, the opposite.



Ethics

131.

You can only convince those persons who think they can benefit

from being convinced.

132.

I trust people who make a living lying down or standing up more

than those who do so sitting down. (From a flâneur who reads in

bed).

133.

Don't trust a man on a salary -except if it is minimum wage.

Those on bondage and βάναυσοι would do anything to "feed a family".

134.

I'd rather be a janitor in a philosophy department than chaired

professor at the Harvard Business School; better be a flâneur in New

York than a hotshot at Davos

135.

Ethical man accords his profession to his beliefs, instead of

according his beliefs to his profession. Rarer and rarer since middle

ages.

136.

I trust everyone except those who tell me they are trustworthy.

137.

People often need to suspend their self-promotion, and have

someone in their lives they do not need to impress. This explains dog

ownership.

138.

I wonder if those who advocate generosity for its rewards notice

the inconsistency, or if what they call generosity is an investment

strategy.

(Comment: A generous act is precisely what should aim at no reward, neither financial nor social nor emotional; deontic not utilitarian. There is nothing wrong with "generous" acts with "warm glow" or salvation; these are not to be linguistically conflated with deontic actions)



139.

I wonder if crooks can conceive that honest people can be

shrewder than them.

140.

Pure generosity is when you help the ingrate. Every other form

is self-serving ,

[Kantian ethics]

141.

In Proust there is a character, Morel, who demonizes Nissim

Bertrand, a Jew who lent him money; he becomes anti-Semitic just

so he could escape the feeling of gratitude.

142.

Promising someone good luck as return for good deeds sounds

like a bribe; perhaps the remnant of archaic, pre-deontic pre-classical

morality.

143.

Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with disdain

144.

The difference between magnificence & arrogance is in what one

does when nobody is looking.



Epistemology

145.

My problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on

birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds

and books on ornithologists written by birds.

146.

Since Plato Western thought has focused on the notions of True-

False; as commendable as it was, it is high time to shift the concern

to Robust-Fragile, and social epistemology to Sucker-Nonsucker.

147.

Knowledge is subtractive, not additive; what we subtract

(reduction by what does not work, what not to do), not what we add

(what to do).

148.

Substractive epistemology: the sucker thinks Truth is search for

knowledge; the nonsucker knows Truth is search for ignorance.

149.

Corollary: The best way to spot a charlatan: someone who tells

you what to do, instead of what NOT to do. (Stockbrokers,

Consultants...)

150.

Happiness; we don't know what it means, nor how to reach it;

but we know extremely well how to avoid unhappiness.

151.

Hard science gives sensational results, with a horribly boring

process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process;

but literature gives sensational results with a sensational process.

152.

Platonic minds expect life to be like film, with defined endings.

APlatonic ones expect film to be life and, except for death, distrust all

ending.



The General ized Sucker Problem

153.

In science you need to understand the world; in business you

need others to misunderstand it.

154.

Education makes the wise slightly wiser; but it makes the fool

vastly more dangerous.

155.

It seems that it is the most unsuccessful people who give the

most advice, particularly for writing and financial matters.

156.

Rumors are only valuable when they are denied.



157.

There are two types of people; those who try to win and those

who try to win arguments. They are never the same.

158.

You are guaranteed a repetition when you hear the declaration

"never again".

159.

People usually apologize so they can do it again.

160.

Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are

either blind or employed.

161.

The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are

fully aware that they are not free. (Generalized Sucker Problem).

162.

Mathematics is to knowledge what an artificial hand is to the

real one. Some frauds, like Robert C. Merton, amputate to replace.

163.

Mediocre men tend to be outraged by small insults, but passive,

subdued, and silent in front of very large ones

We gloss over great financial crimes (bankers), great cases of incompetence (Bernanke and the economics establishment)...

164.

It is easier to disguise ignorance than knowledge.



Robustness and Fragil ity

165.

You are only secure if you can lose your fortune without the

additional worse insult of having to become humble.

(My great-great-great-grandfather's rule).

166.

They have a hard time accepting my idea that the only robust

society is the imbecile proof society. I call it more politely

epistemocracy.

167.

Academics are only useful when they try to be useless, (say, as in

mathematics and philosophy); and dangerous when they try to be

useful.

168.

For the robust, an error is information; for the fragile, an error

is an error.

169.

The best test of robustness to reputational damage is your

emotional state (fear, joy, boredom) when you get an email from a

journalist.

170.

One should first pick a destination for which one has a good

map, instead of travel first then use “the best” map, "because there is

nothing else".



The Ludic Fallacy and Its Extensions

171.

Just as smooth surfaces, competitive sports, and specialized

work fossilize the mind and body, competitive academia fossilizes the

soul.

172.

They agree that chess training only improves chess skills, but

disagree that classroom training (almost) only improves classroom

skills.

173.

Upon arriving to the hotel the fellow had a porter carry his

luggage; I later saw him lifting weights in the gym.

174.

Technology is the unrelenting mollification of man, a self-

inflicted injury.

175.

Compliance with the straightjacket of narrow (Aristotelian) logic

and avoidance of fatal inconsistencies are not the same thing.

176.

Real mathematicians understand completeness; real

philosophers understand incompleteness; the rest don't really

understand anything.

177.

Sadly, Obama is talking and dreaming about going to the Moon

and Mars (these belong to the linear domain) when we know nothing

about the complex (volcanoes, economics, climate, etc). Space builds

hubris.

(How? errors in space program are Gaussian; errors in fields that matter are Black-Gray-Swannish; governments have exhausted the Gaussian domains).Sorry.



The Sacred and the Profane

178.

You cannot express the holy in terms made for the profane; but

you can discuss the profane in terms made for the holy.

179.

Atheism/materialism means treating the dead as if they were

unborn. I won't. By respecting the sacred you reinvent religion.

180.

If you can't detect (w/out understanding) the difference between sacred and profane you'll never know what religion means. Same with art .

181.

People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays, and formal

attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse.

182.

I now take a hot bath after reading emails from businessmen or

journalists; I then feel purified from the profane until the next email.

183.

In 2500 years, no human came with the brilliance, depth,

elegance, wit, and imagination matching Plato to displace him and

protect us from that Platonic legacy.

184.

The book is the only medium left that hasn't been corrupted by

the profane: everything else on your eyelids manipulates you with an

ad.

Comment: after a long media diet I realize that there is nothing that's not (clumsily) trying to sell you something. I only trust my library.

There is nothing wrong w/book as peacock tail signaling of superiority and ego trip; it's the commercial agenda outside the book that corrupts it.



185.

The economy, in brief: they are calmly waiting in line to be

slaughtered while thinking it is for a Broadway show.

186.

You can replace lies with truth; but myth is only displaced with a

narrative.

Dealing with the Future

187.

For the ancients, forecasting historical events was an insult to

the God(s); for me it is an insult to man --that is, for some, to science.

188.

I never voice a forecast unless I have taken action on it and I

have something at risk. I go down with the ship.

189.

They would take forecasting more seriously if it were pointed

out to them that they were producing prophecies.

190.

For Seneca, the Stoic sage should withdraw from public efforts

when unheeded and the state is corrupt beyond repair. It is wiser to

wait for self-destruction.



191.

I went to Saudi Arabia to pick up wisdom from old people about

forecasting. A few idiots criticized me because of the Saudi treatment

of women. These hypocrites drive a car with a tank full of Saudi oil,

while critical their gender policies, but don't want me to take what

wisdom I can find.

Being a Philosopher and Managing to Remain one

192.

To be a philosopher is to know by reasoning, and reasoning

only, a priori, what others can only learn from their mistakes, a posteriori.

193.

True philosophers only need long walks to figure out what

others need crises, accidents, and bankruptcies to determine.

194.

Something finite but with unknown upper bound is

epistemically equivalent to something infinite. I call this epistemic

Infinity.



195.

Conscious ignorance, if you can practice it, expands your world;

it can make things infinite.

196.

There is no strictly "rational" definition of "rationality", which is

why I cringe when I hear the word used by social scientists.

197.

I threatened to walk out of a lecture hall under Seneca's dictum

that philosophers should avoid speaking like mountebanks.

198.

Academia is as close to sophistry today as the sophists were in

Socrates' day; in fact ironically the academy was there to counter

sophistry. 2400 years and we've learned nothing.

Polit ics , Economics , and Other Very Vulgar Subjects

199.

You can be certain that the CEO of a corporation has a lot to

worry about when he announces publicly that "there is nothing to

worry about".

200.

The 20th C was the bankruptcy of the social utopia. The 21st will

be that of the technological one.

From one Procrustean bed to another: efforts at building social, political, and medical utopias have caused nightmares; many cures and techniques came from martial efforts.

201.

The main difference between government bailouts and smoking

is that in some rare cases the statement "this is my last cigarette"

holds true.



202.

Economics cannot digest the idea that the collective (and the

aggregate) are disproportionately less predictable than individuals.

203.

The four most influential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud and

(the early) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It is hard to do

genuine work within institutions.

204.

What makes us fragile is that institutions cannot have the same

virtues (honor, truthfulness, courage, loyalty, tenacity) as

individuals.

205.

An individual has a conscience, feels shame and honor. The

collective (that is, institutions) does not aggregate them -despicable

bureaucrats.

206.

The worst damage has been caused by competent people trying

to do good; the best welfare has been brought by incompetent ones

trying to harm.

207.

City-states organize by tinkering; nation-states produce

bureaucracies, empty suits, Bernankes, deficits, and the too big to

fail.

208.

The Lebanese (and other Mediterraneans) scorn instructions

but bow to authority; Northern Europeans bow to instructions but

scorn authority.

209.

The differences between Goldman Sachs and the mafia are as

follows: GS has a better legal-regulatory expertise; but the mafia

understands public opinion.

210.

We worry about "too big", but the biggest error-prone

centralized top-down institution in the world is the US Gov. It keeps

getting bigger.



211.

"It is much easier to scam people for billions than for just

millions". (Some thoughts on the Madoff story).

212.

At a panel in Moscow, I saw Edmund Phelps who got the

"Nobel" for writings no one reads, theories no one uses, and lectures

no one understands.

213.

Dubai borrowed to put vanity buildings on postcards; America

and Western Europe need to borrow to just survive.

214.

"Don't cross a river because it is on average four feet deep".

More generally, the average of expectations is different from the

expectation of averages.

215.

CNBC journalists are imbeciles. "You need skills to get a BMW,

skills and monstrous luck to become a Warren Buffet" was turned

into "Taleb says Buffet has no skills". Imbeciles.

216.

Socializing with an academic will lead you to avoid confronting

him from fear of losing a friend; you will end up putting your social

instinct above truth.

217.

The curious mind embraces science; the gifted & sensitive, the

arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist.

218.

Companies, like human cells, are programmed for apoptosis,

suicide through debt and hidden risks. Bailouts make the process

more entertaining.



Documents

TALEB - Aphorisms